Boccard Piping & Modular Fabrication is an expert industrial integrator offering a broad spectrum of engineering, fabrication, construction and maintenance, with particular expertise in the following areas:

For Boccard Piping & Modular Fabrication, protecting the health and safety of employees, subcontractors and customers is a top priority. The company operates permanent preventive and corrective safety programs in the following areas:

Risk assessments for each job or workstation

Preventive and corrective action plans

Training plans and exercise schedules

Regular safety meetings and conferences

Safety performance indicator monitoring

On Time. On Spec. On Budget

Global performance strategy: A high standard of service at competitive cost

Project Management: We use dedicated project management systems - Boccard Project Management System and BocTrack - to plan and monitor all phases of a fabrication project and ensure appropriate transparency and project visibility (Boccard Weld Unit Standard). These software applications ensure compliance with the customer’s priorities while providing sufficient flexibility in response to unexpected changes. The contract budget and delivery deadlines are also monitored using these software.

Engineering: A centralized design and engineering office provides support for all production centers. It uses special-purpose software (Spoolgen; BocTrack; 3D Modelling, etc.). Piping system and support design and engineering.

Manufacturing: Leader in manufacturing capacity, with permanent workshops in six countries, supported by mobile project-specific shops to comply with local content requirements and optimize costs and logistics. Our workshops are equipped with heat treatment systems (furnaces and machines) as well as blasting and painting facilities.

By opting for shop-based prefabrication of up to 80% of its piping systems, the customer can significantly reduce the total installed cost.

Construction and Maintenance: The Boccard Construction & Maintenance Business Area (BCM) operates a world-wide network able to perform the mechanical instalation of prefabricated spool and maintenance of the facilities

Success stories

Piping system prefabrication for the Crescent Dunes Solar Energy project

( Tonopah -Nevada- USA )

The Spanish company Grupo Cobra, a member of the ACS group, has awarded us a contract to prefabricate 1,200 tons of piping as part of the "Crescent Dunes Solar Energy Project". This project, located in Tonopah (Nevada, USA) is one of the world's largest in thermo-solar power generation, featuring a central tower. USA). This 124 MW plant will cover the needs of 75,000 Las Vegas households. These 1,200 tons (2,345 spools - 16,000 weld units) of piping, prefabricated in our Houston workshops, include 155 tons of 347H Stainless Steel pipes and 190 tons of P(T)9.1 grade steel alloy pipes, produced using a highly sophisticated welding procedure. This procedure closely monitors the preheating phase and the inter-pass temperature , and features a hydrogen removal heat treatment (bake out) followed by a Stress-Relief Post Weld Heat Treatment.

Pipe Spool Prefabrication for the OPF Sakhalin 1 & 2 project

( Sakhalin - Russia )

This was a project for Exxon Neftegas and the engineering was completed by Fluor. The process includes crude oil and gas from the Chayvo , Odoptu and Arkutum-Dagi oilfields on the Russian island of Sakhalin, which is then transported to an onshore processing facility (OPF) with a daily capacity of 250,000 barrels of crude oil and 22.4 million cubic meters of natural gas. As part of the prefabrication operations for this unit on this project, we received an order for 12.500 Low-Temperature Carbon Steel (LTCS) and Stainless Steel spools. Some Carbon Steel spools were 3-1/8" thick. The production work for this 75.000 Weld Units and 4.200 tons was completed at our facility in Houston, Texas.

This prefabrication Purchase Order for more than 3,000 tons of piping was placed with us, as part of the ExxonMobil Chemical’s NAG-OR project. The EPC contract for this project to expand the Baytown petrochemical complex in Texas was awarded to Linde and Bechtel. Bechtel subcontracted the pipe spool prefabrication of the entire cooling system to our Business Unit in Houston, TX. Many of the 1872 Carbon Steel spools manufactured at our facility in Houston had very large diameters ranging from 80" to 120" . The pipe thickness on these spools, ranged between 3/4" and 1.219". These spools, according to client specifications were subject to Postweld Weld Heat Treatment. As the cooling system is an underground system, all welds were checked by Magnetic Particle Inspection (at weld roots), Radiographic Inspection and vacuum testing. This piping, was received pre-painted with fusion-bond epoxy (FBE) and touched up upon completion of our fabrication operations. The spools were also examined using a Holiday detector, to ensure perfect paint adherence and corrosion resistance.

Piping module prefabrication for the LHC cryogenic lines

( Geneva, Switzerland )

Fabrication of cryogenic lines for the Large Hadron ColliderCERN’s Large Hadron Collider (LHC) is a 17 miles long ring structure, and built 328 feet underground, located near the Franco-Swiss border near Geneva. It is the world’s largest particle accelerator. Very high-energy protons are fired in opposing directions through particle beam pipes; the resulting collisions are studied for clues about super symmetry, dark matter and the origin of the mass of elementary particles. These protons, which are accelerated to nearly the speed of light, are kept in circulation for hours, guided by very powerful superconducting magnets. The magnetic field required for such operations can only be generated by cooling the magnets with advanced cryogenic techniques. In the LHC, these techniques, which harness the properties of nitrogen and helium, were designed by Air Liquide Advanced Technologies. Boccard’s Piping & Modular Fabrication business Area contributed to this project by manufacturing the 530 piping modules that form the LHC ring. This work was carried out at our workshop in Portugal, which holds ALTAL and ISO 9001 certifications. These Stainless Steel modules were assembled using welding processes qualified to a temperature of -192°C. After subjecting every weld to Radiographic Inspection, the modules underwent a series of pneumatic pressure tests, thermal shock and helium leak tests, culminating in vacuum behavior tests.Watch the Cern LHC video:

Prefabrication and assembly management of the project "Energía y Vapor" of the Ecopetrol Barrancabermeja refinery

( Colombia )

After 14 months of focused pipe spool fabrication, Boccard Piping & Modular Fabrication completed work on the Reficar project. This project has been the single largest prefabricated pipe spool project received to date by Boccard. This was a major oil refinery expansion located in Cartagena, Colombia. It was engineered by CB&I. A few highlighted points of interest were: 64,789 spools, 263,154 weld units totaling 12,350 tons of piping and fitting materials. A variety of material types were used to manufacture these spools ranged in diameters from 1/2" to 72": Carbon Steel (CS/LTCS), Stainless Steel (304 / 316 / 347), Alloy Steel (A 335 P11 / P5 / P9), Monel and Inconel. Our Project Management team was based in Houston, Texas. We coordinated and executed the success of this project through collaboration efforts between 4 of our globally recognized Boccard Business Units. Fabrication was executed at our following locations: BPF (USA), BPC (Colombia) and BISF (Tunisia). Detail Engineering activity was completed at our office in Malaysia. Material purchasing activities were successfully coordinated and executed from start to finish on this project as well thanks to BocTrade service.

Piping module prefabrication for the LHC Cryogenic lines project

( Geneva - Switzerland )

CERN’s Large Hadron Collider (LHC) is a 18 miles long ring structure built 328 feet underground below the Franco-Swiss border near Geneva. It is the world’s largest particle accelerator. Very high-energy protons are fired in opposing directions through particle beam pipes; the resulting collisions are studied for clues about supersymmetry, dark matter and the origin of the mass of elementary particles. These protons, which are accelerated to nearly the speed of light, are kept in circulation for hours, guided by very powerful superconducting magnets. The magnetic field required for such operations can only be generated by cooling the magnets with advanced cryogenic techniques. In the LHC, these techniques, which harness the properties of nitrogen and helium, were designed by Air Liquide Advanced Technologies. Boccard’s Piping & Modular Fabrication business area contributed to this project by manufacturing the 530 piping modules that form the LHC ring. This work was carried out at our workshop in Portugal, which holds ALTAL and ISO 9001 certifications. These stainless steel modules were welded using processes qualified to -192°C. After subjecting every weld to X-ray inspection, the modules underwent a series of pneumatic pressure tests, thermal shock and helium leak tests, culminating in vacuum behavior tests.

Supply of 12.000 tons of material for the Cartagena refinery expansion project

( Colombia )

After 14 months of focused pipe spool fabrication, Boccard Piping & Modular Fabrication completed work on the Reficar project. This project has been the single largest prefabricated pipe spool project received to date by Boccard. This was a major oil refinery expansion located in Cartagena, Colombia. It was engineered by CB&I. A few highlighted points of interest were: 64,789 spools, 263,154 weld units totaling 12,350 tons of piping and fitting materials. A variety of material types were used to manufacture these spools ranged in diameters from 1/2" to 72": Carbon Steel (CS/LTCS), Stainless Steel (304 / 316 / 347), Alloy Steel (A 335 P11 / P5 / P9), Monel and Inconel. Our Project Management team was based in Houston, Texas. We coordinated and executed the success of this project through collaboration efforts between (4) four of our globally recognized Boccard Business Units. Fabrication was executed at our following locations: BPF (USA), BPC (Colombia) and BISF (Tunisia). Detail Engineering activity was completed at our office in Malaysia. Material purchasing activities were successfully coordinated and executed from start to finish on this project as well.

Pipe spool prefabrication for the European Pressurized Reactor (EPR) Flamanville Nuclear Power Plant

( Flamanville - France )

This new pressurized-water nuclear reactor technology has been adopted in four countries, including France, at EDF’s Flamanville site. On this project, our Business Area, Boccard Piping & Modular Fabrication produced prefabricated pipe spools at its fabrication facility located in Portugal. Boccard's Portugal workshop is ISO 9001 and EDF-UTO certified, which qualifies us to perform work subject to RCC-M design and construction rules. This prefabrication order included a total of 29,615 spools (including 115 "Jacketed" spools). Materials of construction included, Carbon Steel, Chrome Alloy and Stainless Steel (Uranus). A grand total of 507 tons of pipe and 71,050 Weld Units were required to complete the pipe spool fabrication. We were responsible for the logistics and transportation to the site, along with organizing special logistics for components exceeding 20 meters in length. The mechanical installation was completed out on site.

Pipe Spool Prefabrication for the "Escravos Gas to Liquids" project

( Nigeria )

This project provided to Chevron Nigeria Limited and Nigerian National Petroleum Company is a Gas To Liquid (GTL) facility, located 100 km from the Nigerian capital, Lagos. The plant is designed to transform natural gas into other liquid hydrocarbons. The contract to build the project, which was designed using technologies developed by Sasol and Chevron, was awarded to a consortium, featuring JJC, KBR and Snamprogetti. KBR, then subcontracted the pipe spools fabrication to us. The main scope of our award was coordinated and executed between our fabrication facilities in both Tunisia and Houston. This project's highlights included 14,500 pipe spools, ranging from 2” to 36” diameter. This translated to 6,000 tons of material and 108,000 weld units. The prefabricated parts, most of which were produced in Carbon Steel, Stainless Steel and Chrome Alloys, were then transported to Nigeria in open-top containers.

Pipe Spool Prefabrication for the "Escravos Gas to Liquids" project

( Lagos - Nigeria )

This project provided to Chevron Nigeria Limited and Nigerian National Petroleum Company is a Gas To Liquid (GTL) facility, located 100 km from the Nigerian capital, Lagos. The plant is designed to transform natural gas into other liquid hydrocarbons. The contract to build the project, which was designed using technologies developed by Sasol and Chevron, was awarded to a consortium, featuring JJC, KBR and Snamprogetti. KBR, then subcontracted the pipe spools fabrication to us. The main scope of our award was coordinated and executed between our fabrication facilities in both Tunisia and Houston. This project's highlights included 14.500 pipe spools, ranging from 2” to 36” diameter. This translated to 6.000 tons of material and 108.000 weld units. The prefabricated parts, most of which were produced in Carbon Steel, Stainless Steel and Chrome Alloys, were then transported to Nigeria in open-top containers.

Pipe Spool Prefabrication for the SINCOR Downstream Refinery Project

( José - Venezuela )

This project partially owned by Total is one of the four large projects implemented in Venezuela to work extra-heavy crude from the Orinoco oil belt. The design goal of this process was to improve the density of 8 degrees API of the extra-heavy oil, transforming it to a light crude with a density of 30-32. This process also yields large quantities of coke and sulfur. The Contrina consortium led by Technip for this project, awarded us a contract for 4,800 tons of prefabricated pipe spools. We utilized two of our pipe fabrication facilities to perform the scope of work. Our facility in Venezuela completed (8,000 carbon steel spools) and our shop in Tunisia completed (1,500 stainless steel and alloy steel spools).